Gigabyte HD 7950 should be 900 MHz, came stock as 1000 Mhz...?

It was stable enough to run 3dmark11. I didn't try games though, as that kind of raw power ain't needed. But the temps of course, naturally, were high, or I mean, wanted to get high anyways. But I had a Window open and I think, if you have an aggressive fan profile then it's ok. As long as you keep temps below 72C or something.

For 24/7.. I think it could work, but then you'd need to have a very aggressive fan profile to keep temps down and even possibly.. with that, keep the card stable as well.

In the future, definitely, if I feel I just need a few more (minimum) fps, I will turn to the glorious 1250mhz oc and squeeze every little inch outta this card as I can. Maybe in a year or two or so? Maybe I'll even try it for Crysis 3, we'll see. But I'm sure just 1100/1200 is enough for Crysis 3 and future games. As this 1200mhz oc (even 1100mhz is better) rapes a stock GTX 680 (and a mildly OC'ed one as well you could say) and is most of the time better than an OCed GTX 670, to give you an idea of where this card stands and what performance it holds.

Doing 1200mhz on the core 24/7 for gaming is no big deal, just need to have a tad more aggressive fan profile. I'm telling you, this card is a beast.

No wonder I went with the 7950.. (I was also deciding between 670s 7970s and everything in the beginning of time xD).

Oh, and I forgot to mention the voltages for the clock speeds.

For 1250mhz it's pretty much 1.3v.
For 1200mhz its 1.25v
And 1150mhz 1.212v.
1100mhz - 1.162-1.174v.

 

Haha, I am glad you liked it Sadly, the second time the card died, it didn't work.

Back On Topic, I just played an hour or so of MW3, not the most graphics intensive game, but it was very stable. Gonna try to push the card with some furmark next.
Sadly I'm running XP, so can't try 3dmark 11 or Vantage.

I know, I know, I am going to upgrade soon

 

@ Deathchild, BTW, you did say that the new BIOS (F43?) was 900 /1250 MHz, right?

That would be the one for me then. At least then the card will be as advertised, although I am not complaining about that

@CLass - did you the mail with the BIOS?

 

Yeah, correct, it was 900/1250. But as I said, giving it a mild OC of either 1000/1500 or 1100/1500 is like putting butter on your bread. So no worries about that.

And yeah, you should definitely upgrade to Windows 7 already.. (*whispers* TPB is the Robin Hood of our time).

Btw, I still have the old F3 bios on my USB.. the one with 1000MHz on the core..

 

Guys, I recommend OCCT w/ error check for stability testing. THEN testing out a multitude of games, benchmarks, etc... simple reason: a card that is unstable in OCCT is very unlikely to be stable in tough games and benchmarks, and a card that is stable in OCCT is very unlikely to be unstable in tough games and benchmarks.

 

Aight, thanks. Is OCCT preferable over Furmark?

 

It doesn't really matter, just run some tests, if it works then play some games, if it works for a few hours then you have a stable OC, nothing difficult in that. It's not rocket science.

This line confused me a little bit, lol! XD

 

One of those arguments that makes perfect sense, but sometimes you just can't wrap your head around them. Must read them twice and stuff.
Usually it depends on wheter or not I've had my daily dose of coffee/tea or not. Without it, my mind won't work as well

/edit - Heeeeey, "Master Guru". About time. I've only been a member since 2004

 

indeed.

Congratulations anyhow. Seems you've been a very minimal user in these forums considering the year 2004.

 

yes sir i received the bios, thank you very much for that!
i will try it out tomorrow evening because now i have to cook, clean,..:wanker:
again, thanks for the efforts and results guys!

ich wünsche einen schönen tag

 

Nah, I wouldn't say very minimal, but I have been lurking more than posting. thats just how I roll. I am sneaky that way.:toke:

 

hey deathchild i registered just to ask you regarding flashing of fz1 bios i have the same fz1 bios on my gigabyte 7950 windforce 3.
its pretty much ok "on stock 1000/1250 1.250v"
but i don't know where the artifact is comming from.
i tried this oc settings using sapphire trixx 1180/1480 1.280v " i was assuming that the stock V was too low to overclock it more ? "
im really confused on what to do but im trying that ccc thing you did ! pull all the slidebars ! ahahaha
what do you think i should do with my card ?
i can pretty much run all my games at max " can even override settings using radeon pro / ccc " but is it right to think that it will perform better if i oc it ? or just to be ready and be experienced for what might this card do for the next gen of gaming. as of now im downloading crysis 3 and willing to pay for it "but im still not in the mood cause i keep looking back on what happened to crysis 1 & 2"

PS: sorry to disturb

fail the ccc thing you did. . . white blank screen after 5mins furmark ,

 

Heyheyhey, slow down now. First of all, the stock voltage of 1.25v during load is pretty high. So temperatures will be higher as well. It would be better if you flashed to a more user-friendly bios such as the F43 that I currently have with a lower voltage. It will enable you to oc better and have lower temperatures as well.

First of all, don't use CCC or anything for overclocking. Leave it untouched. Remove all OC settings or whatever that you have in it right now. Download MSI Afterburner, and it would be best to use that.

Stock voltage of 1.25v is very high. A normal stock voltage for these cards would be something about 1.050v+-. Mine is 1.093v for example. But now I have an oc of 1100/1500 @ 1.168v.

For now, try not to touch the voltage sliders or anything, leave it as it is because 1.25v is high enough. I will go to sleep now, very tired, and tomorrow we'll continue with this and I'll help you out (and other users as well).

 

trying to flash now with ati flash.

@deathchild hey bro. i successfully flashed it with f43 bios. im currently playing with oc's and stuff. . . im a little experienced on flashing and overclocking. most of my knowledge about this came from you guys. . .reading and lurking. . . thank you so much for the help. . ill try sapphire trixx now as it is my favorite overclocking software if it doesn't work maybe its time to move on to msi ab. thank you mate.

reedit : was able to run furmark 2x 15mins benchmark burnin test with result of

BURN-IN SCORE: 4445 points

same clock as you did 1100/1500 1.168v

but there is a weird sound comming from my psu "corsiar 750tx v2" it sounds like electric buzz while running furmark. it doesn't sound like that when im playing crysis3 or anygames just with furmark. i think im ok with it and im happy now. thank you very much !

+ it fixed the artifacts. regardless of what i do with my previous fz1 bios its causing my games to artifact whenever im pass 30minutes playing. maybe its because of that 1.25v thank you very much saved me !

 

Hello again peeps.

I spent yesterday evening reading up on the different bioses, flashing and the dual bios system of this card. Since the card is factory new, I decided to try the second bios. Just wanted to know if the backup bios was 1000 MHz as well.
The switch was set to position 2 from stock. Thats the 1000 MHz FZ Bios. So popped it over to position 1 and turned the power on, but no luck there. The computer wouldn't even post. No signal to my monitor at all. Switched it back and the computer booted up to the FZ bios again.

Strange, no? This card might be a dud after all. Or did I miss something?

 

@Sphexx, glad to hear man! Nicely done, good to hear it's stable now and there's no more artifacting. Btw, you could even use 1.5v for the memory for 1500mhz. Let us know if you have any more issues. We'll help out.

w00t, really? mrBullseye? Wow, in that case, if it won't even post on the 1st bios switch then I think the card must be a returned one, the previous owner must've messed up and returned the card and the store just flipped the switch.

Anyways, this is something we can fix. So I am at your service on this one mrBullseye. The question is now, do you want to bother with the store or do you just wanna get it fixed, cause we can do it easily together.

Anyways, to get us started, we'd have to do a normal flash on the card, but just before you enter in the flash command, you flip the switch back to the bricked 1st bios and it will flash it over with the new F43 bios, which will work.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=373744 post #6 Just to note, this topic is about the exact same thing.

Sphexx btw, go ahead and do a 3dmark11 "benchmark tests only" run and let us know what you get.

 

I've downloaded the F43 Bios and the tools needed from Gigabyte, but I need to understand a few things before I get started. I also need to think it over and maybe contact the retailer. I haven't decided yet returning the card is a hassle and cost money plus I can save this card myself easily.

On the other hand. It has an ASIC quality of 59.5% which is very low, and I have been reading on the interwebs that Gigabyte basically cherry picks low ASIC cards. I also ran the card through Furmark yesterday and found that it throttled the frequency down when reaching ~73 degrees Celsius, meaning that it is a hot running card, even with the windforce cooler.

Need to think it over.

About the dual BIOS thing. Is one of the BIOSes write protected? In that case, which one? As I said, position 2 was selected on my card, and on Gigabytes home page, that is listed as "factory default" and position 1 is listed as "backup".

In that case, my card was borked on the "backup" position that should have been write protected, no?

 

There is no difference between the 2 switches. You can flash them both equally and switch between them back and forth.

The reason why it is running hot is due to the high 1.25v on the core. Higher voltages means higher temperatures. Thus, it is also why it was deemed "unstable". And that is also the reason why we need to flash.

Now, if you read through the posts, then as I mentioned, don't use the tools that are available on their website, they absolutely suck. They mess up big time. Best would be to manually flash using atiflash on a bootable USB.

I think you're worrying too much, it's okay, we can fix it, if you would allow me to help you out with this of course.

+that ASIC quality is ok, I have 59,6% myself and this card is a beast. As I said again, lower ASICs mean that you can reach higher frequencies but at the cost of a higher voltage (and higher temperatures), higher ASIC means better OCing on air @ lower voltages but it may not OC so far. So it's 50/50. Generally for air higher ASIC is better of course, but it really doesn't matter that much. Right now I'm using 1100/1500 @ 1.168v, load temperatures are like.. 65C? And the fan is quiet.

Other cards @ 1.25v would get temperatures (much) higher than 75C definitely, the Windforce is one of the best there is.

Anyways, in case you're gonna flash later on then all the necessary steps will be in the #6 post in that topic I posted earlier.

And btw, just to give you a slight idea where I'm coming from: the same thing happened to me exactly, but I flashed to a 7970 bios and no screen showed up, So I made my way into google and eventually successfully flashed the card back and got it working. So you got a seasoned GPU-Bricked-Bios War Veteran here ready to step up.

 

You're a champ dude. :thumbup:

Yeah, I've read that the Gigabyte providden tools are garbage, but I actually noticed that they provide you with atiflash in the installation folder of the easy boost program.

Okay. So we overwrite the BIOS on position 1 and make that work and I will still have the BIOS on position 2 left, then nothing should be able to go wrong.

Awesome. I actually think, with all the posts you've linked me, and the information you've provided thus far, that I will be able to do this without any problems whatsoever. I'll holler if I need any more help, otherwise, I'll flash the bad BIOS into F43 and then let you know.

:nerd:

 

Alrighty man, sounds good. You'll be good. Look forward to hearing the results.